Ruminations on Spirituality, Recovery and Creativity

Day 92

I am reading Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, by Nic Sheff. Nic was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he would smoke pot regularly, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. He always felt like he could quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. (Man, that sounds rather familiar!) It took a violent relapse one summer to convince him otherwise. Nic spares no detail. The book is hard to stomach, yet difficult to put down. This kid can write.

Nic was 20 when he wrote Tweak. He unfortunately relapsed 5 times since the book was published. He was compelled to write a second memoir called We All Fall Down: Living With Addiction. It was released in 2011. He admits, in this book, that he was getting high while on tour promoting Tweak. Great news! He has not relapsed since writing his second book. Nic writes a regular column at https://www.thefix.com. I encourage you to check it out.

The following is an excerpt from Tweak.

Day 92

Recovery is strange, you know? I mean, it is so easy in a way and yet, well, so difficult. The woman who ran my Sober Living in L.A., the place I checked into after moving here from New York, describes addiction as a disease of amnesia. I think that pretty much sums it up. It’s not hard to stay sober at first. Sure, it’s hard as hell to get sober, to pull yourself out of the cycle of getting high every day and going through the horrors of detox. But, honestly, once the drugs are out of my system, it isn’t too difficult to genuinely feel like I never want to go through that shit again. Staying sober right after coming back from a relapse is no struggle. Every time I’ve come out of detox, the last thing I ever want to do is get high. This time is no different.

But the thing is, as the months go by, I always seem to forget why I needed to get sober in the first place. The bad shit starts to not seem really that bad. I start blaming other people, thinking they’re all just overreacting and whatever. I tell myself that I wasn’t really that out of control. At least that’s my rationale. I swear, every time I’ve relapsed has been the same story. And, each time, I get a little closer to being dead. Things fall apart more quickly. I hurt more and more people.

I cannot let that happen again. I cannot. Somehow, I have to make this different. But how do I accomplish this?